Thursday, 1 November 2012

Tails and Fins and Angel Wings

Let’s say that my life is a work of fiction. If this is true
then it has a structure: a backbone to which hundreds of years of evolution
have attached tails and fins and angel wings. Now I, Chelsea Moore, am a
construct designed to fulfil some purpose. Every time I miss the train or get
called scag in the corridor or even breathe, it means something, like God is
twitching my limbs with his pen.

Now maybe I
can make sense of it all.

My story
ends simply. I am lying on the tiles in the toilets bleeding thought bubbles
from the back of the head. My eyes are closed. My mouth hangs open like the
lips of a milk carton. I am not dead but I should be. And since this is
fiction, let’s say that I am.

There is
Gloria Cupbottom shaking me, lifting my head then not knowing what to do with
it, retreating as the blood edges closer to her school dress. She has an
epiphany. She starts to cry.

It doesn’t matter what she does
next.

I spend so much time in those
toilets but I don’t remember a thing about them except that the bowl smells
like the canteen’s Tuesday chicken rolls and I can see my fat cheeks in the water’s
reflection before I throw up.

That’s where I am when she finds
me. I don’t even know she is there. Something just grabs me under the arms and
pulls me up and everything goes white and squiggly, like someone is changing
the channel behind my eyes. I am flying. My legs go limp and something—the
roof—hits me in the back of the head and I die.

I don’t know if it is chance that
she finds me there, but this is fiction so let’s pretend she followed me. She
has followed me since she the story’s beginning—when we sat me down in the
canteen at the start of lunch. She opens her bag and pulls out two sandwiches.
Ham and cheese and lettuce and tomato and mayonnaise on sourdough.

“I noticed you never bring
lunch,” she says. “So I thought maybe we could eat together.”

I’d like to pretend that I’m
poor, that I got into this school on a scholarship and my dad doesn’t have two
slices of bread to stick together with peanut butter. But that wouldn’t explain
why I say no.

I say no because she is a loser.
She’s a loser because she has no friends. She has no friends because she
doesn’t try to make friends. She doesn’t try to make friends because she’s fat.

“I’m really worried about you,”
she says. “You’re so thin.”

“You know nothing about me,” I
tell her.

“Oh come on Chelsea,”
she says. “Everyone can see it.”

I stand up and everything turns
squiggly. I try to walk away like nothing is wrong.

So that’s it. Now I have a
character trapped in the walls of a story. Now I can pull apart the letters
that hold her together and pass judgement on her like the idle gossip of the
lunch-time corridor.

No. Here’s a more interesting
story.

There is a girl who thinks that
stories can exist without someone to read them. She thinks life can be
summarised and changed and that it amounts to something more than a stream of
thoughts that are thought of and forgotten. She can write and think and pass
the day until the next day begins and she will stand on naked on the bathroom
scales at 7:15 worrying about the
weight of her thoughts until the needle stops and she sighs zero grams of
relief. She can grow skinnier and escape into books but she will never leave
her own head.